Temperature of the room Brightness of the room Potential hazards Fire exits Mobiles off or on mute If you do take a call, please do so outside of the room Happy to take questions during the session
A few introductions – you wouldn’t mind just telling me what you do for TVCOC
A little bit about – me! Now, this may seem a little self-indulgent, but please…
Bear with me… There is a good reason for this!
I’m 5 foot 11 and ¾ inches, which according to this height chart puts me on the 75 th percentile for a man of my age I weigh..
I weigh
I’d like to think that I look like this…
But in reality, I probably look a little bit more like this…
I have blonde hair Blue eyes And an invisible beard. Being blonde and having a beard is a bit of a challenge sometimes, when people walk up to me and say Hey, you’ve shaved off your…oh no you haven’t.
I’m married ..to this women. My wife.
For 13 years.
Who every morning has to wake up to this…
When she’s rather be waking up to this…
I have two children, Hannah, who is 5 and Gemma who is three and started school last week. I think they look very cute in this picture, however most of the time…
They’re pulling faces at each other
This is where I was born
… drug up in Yorkshire…
And this is where I now live – the dreaming spires of Oxford…
Well, more specifically, the village of Wolvercote
In my free time (of which I have very little), I do some stand-up comedy…
I run a sketch writing group called The Guild of the Forbidden Helmet
And I do performance poetry using the pseudonym AYM
These are the companies I have worked for…
These are the companies I have worked for…
Before setting up my own business, called Jericho – Marketing Training, Coaching & Consulting
So, why did I tell you all of this information?
Well, in the words of Gary Barlow…
Who I suspect this women…
Would prefer to be spending her time with…
Have a little bit of patience…
So What is social media?
They give the individual a voice…
Is it business or pleasure?
Some sites are specifically designed for business use
But shouldn’t business be fun?
What do corporates have that you might not?
Money that they can spend on advertising, PR & branding
Sure I have my logos, but that doesn’t mean I have a brand…
You
Your personality
Your knowledge
Your experience
Which all go to make up your personal brand
So, why did I tell you all of this information?
This presentation is part of my personal brand.
Social Media gives you an opportunity to communicate that personal brand…
People prefer to do business with people they like
So when I asked the question Business or Pleasure…
The answer is business & pleasure. If you want to be successful with Social Media, you can’t expect your Personal Brand unless there is something personal about it
This comes from Penny & Thomas Power who set up the Social Media site ecademy…
How can this guy expect to do business with me? I don’t know him. He expects me to click on a link on the basis of a one-off message? He has made absolutely no effort to ingratiate himself with me.
With Social Media – you have to use a different voice. You can’t just post a press release into a blog, as people will immediately see it for what it is for…
With Social Media, there is a different approach. You stroke my back and I’ll stroke yours. You do something for someone and expect them to do something in return.
These people have all helped me along my way and I now do the same for them. Nick Tadd, Bill Crosby and Sylwia Presley. These are great examples of Social Media experts.
When I was building my training website, I included information about my comedy & performance poetry. Some people said to me “Oh – I don’t think that you should include that stuff, as some people might not take you seriously”. I thought, well 50% of people will understand the link between performance & training, however 50% will not – can I afford to alienate half of my potential audience. I started to worry – and slowly, over time, I started taking stuff out. When I stripped it all out, I looked at my site and was sure that nobody could be offended. However I wasn’t happy. I looked at it and thought. Sure, nobody could be offended, however for the 50% of people who did get the link between performance & training, the 50% of people I was interested in, there was absolutely nothing to differentiate me from any other training business. So guess what? I put it back in. And these people, Ayd Instone & Kimberley Hare, were instrumental to my decision to do that, so I owe them a debt of gratitude.
My blog page – a bit of business & a bit of pleasure First of all, my Twitter updates Next of all, a picture of my kids on their first day back to school Next – a bit of retweeting – pushing other people’s content to my audience – a bit of you scratch my back… And finally, an article I wrote about the impact of Social Media on corporate culture.
So – Now to spend a little bit of time on twitter
Does anyone know who this is? Aston Kutcher. One of the many arguments I’ve heard about Twitter is that all that Twitter is good for is to find out what Aston Kutcher had for breakfast. He uses Twitter a lot, as do other celebrities. But Twitter is so much more than that…
I have 5 accounts – 2 which I update with my content and two which I update automatically with third party content
River of information, so you have to keep on flowing your information again and again and you have to stay organised to make sure you capture the things from other people that are of most interest to you.
Twitter is a window. The great thing about Twitter is that is a window to a much bigger world. It gives a short precis of what you’re doing, but then it can include a shortened hypertext link providing the reader to find out even more about what your taking about. The reader decides whether to open the window or not.
Can Twitter be used on its own?
Not really.
Two great apps for organising the Twitter streams you are following are Tweetdeck and my personal favourite Seesmic. Both are great, but each of them could do with features that the other has. I always await the new releases of these apps with baited breath! You can put several twitter accounts at once on these and watch your friends Facebook updates on there as well. You can also send tweets (to your entire audience) & direct messages (to an individual) from here too. The best feature is groups, which allows you to select the people you are most interested in and what them only, so you don’t have to wade through all of the tweets. I have thousands of followers, 80% of whom are just trying to sell me something, so this is an absolutely essential feature.
Then there are following tools. Twittersearch & Twellow are directory services. You can search people by interest search word and then follow them on mass. So – If I was interested in gardening, I would type in gardening, find all the people who were also interested and them decide who to follow and not. Tweetlater is a great tool that does lots of things. It can send an automatic direct message to someone when they connect to you thanking them for following you. It can also automate the following too. If they have followed you, then it can automate it so that you follow them straight back without you having to do anything. My favourite Twitter app is Twollo, which automatically follows people for you. So – you tell Twollo what you’re interest in and it automatically finds people you’d be interested in and follows them for you. It finds people with a profile you’d be interested in and follows them for you. Most of them will follow you back, so it automatically builds an audience for you.
Then there is where you get your content from. Firstly there is your own content. You can post links from blogs like blogger, video services like YouTube and Photo hosting sites like Flickr. Then there is other people’s content. With Google alerts, you type in a term of something your interested in and then it can send you an email every time (or a daily digest) something pops up on Google matching your interest. It can also, rather than sending you emails, set up an RSS feed. I’ll tell you a little bit more about RSS feeds later. StumbleUpon is soooo cool. You go onto the site and tell the site what your interested in, so it takes a profile of you. Then you download a button into your browser. You simply press and repress the button and you stumble across sites that match your profile. It shows you sites that other people with similar profiles to you have also looked at. Digg & delicious are bookmarking sites, but rather than being embedded into your browser, they are stored on the web. This way, you can access your favourites from any computer in the world and you can also see your ‘friends’ favourites as well.
How to distribute the content. Twitterfeed takes your RSS feeds (I told you about those earlier under Google Alerts) and converts them into posts. So if you like gardening and a new article on gardening is found by Google, then Google Alerts can send a feed to Twitterfeed, that then converts that data into a Tweet on Twitter or on other services, such as Ping. Now Ping has to be my all favourite thing on the web at the moment – even better than Twollo. Basically, it can link all of your Social Media sites. If you have blogs and a twitter account and a myspace account and a Bebo account and a Hi5 account, etc. etc. then you simple have to type what you want into Ping and it will update all of your sites for you. Fantastic. Or you can set up and RSS feed in Google alerts, which gets converted by Twitterfeed, posted to Ping, which then distributes it across all of your networks. And you don’t have to do anything! With Tweetlater, which we have already spoken about, you can set it up so that it resends tweets several times. This way, if somebody misses your tweet in the river of information, then they are more likely so see it later. Then there is the phone. I can do a picture message or an email with a picture attachment, email it to ping who then send it across all of my networks. And Pixelpipe. With that you can send a video from your PC or phone to Pixelpipe, wh when distribute it across all your networks.
Managing Twitter. When you get to a certain point with Twitter if you are following many more people than are following you, it will stop you from following any more until the numbers have evened out a little. Therefore you have to clean up your account. Twitter Karma shows you all the people who you are following and vice versa and enables you to unfollow anyone who hasn’t taken the opportunity to follow you back.
Some really cool apps. Twitter grader uses an interesting algorithm to tell you how well you are using your account. Twitterholic shows you who the most popular Twitter users are in real time. By the way, Aston Kutcher is number 2 last time I looked. TwitterStats shows you stats about your account usage. Twittercounter is very similar to Twitterholic!